Download or read book The Story of English in 100 Words written by David Crystal and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring Latinate and Celtic words, weasel words and nonce-words, ancient words ('loaf') to cutting edge ('twittersphere') and spanning the indispensable words that shape our tongue ('and', 'what') to the more fanciful ('fopdoodle'), Crystal takes us along the winding byways of language via the rude, the obscure and the downright surprising. In this unique new history of the world's most ubiquitous language, linguistics expert David Crystal draws on words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular since the first definitively English word was written down in the fifth century ('roe', in case you are wondering).
Download or read book Story of English written by Robert McCrum and published by . This book was released on 1993-06-30 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English Language written by David Crystal and published by Panpac Education Pte Ltd. This book was released on 1988 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History in English Words written by Owen Barfield and published by SteinerBooks. This book was released on 2003-06-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The playful artistry of the Waldorf Alphabet Book speaks to the heart of childhood. These lively illustrations, so filled with color, movement, eloquent gesture, and invention conjure up long-forgotten memories of books from a time when pictures were still alive and spoke with power. Each page is a magical door, opening to the bright realm where stories are enacted, a realm of wonders accessible to children, artists, and ll those in whom the light of imagination shines. "The most important thing as you peruse the delightful pages of the Waldorf Alphabet Book with your child is the engaging conversation that flows between you as you search among the pictures for words." (from the afterword) In this delightful, bestselling alphabet and game book for young children, each consonant and vowel comes to life in vivid pictures that show each letter's unique qualities in the world. The vibrant and playful illustrations help children learn the alphabet in the most natural and living way. This expanded paperback edition includes a complete essay by master Waldorf teacher William Ward, "Learning to Read and Write in Waldorf Schools": This is the alphabet book for parents and teachers who want to encourage the most natural development in children. It is ideal for both at home and in the classroom. It also makes an ideal gift for your favorite young child or parents!
Download or read book Sounds Appealing written by David Crystal and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's not what you say, it's the way that you say it ... There have long been debates about 'correct' pronunciation in the English language, and Britain's most distinguished linguistic expert, David Crystal, is here to set the record straight. Sounds Appealing tells us exactly why, and how, we pronounce words as we do. Pronunciation is integral to communication, and is tailored to meet the demands of the two main forces behind language: intelligibility and identity. Equipping his readers with knowledge of phonetics, linguistics and physiology - with examples ranging from Eliza Doolittle to Winston Churchill - David Crystal explores the origins of regional accents, how they are influenced by class and education, and how their peculiarities have changed over time.
Download or read book Big Board First 100 Words written by Roger Priddy and published by Priddy Books US. This book was released on 2005-08-01 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Priddy’s Big Board First 100 Words is a perfect children’s book offering simple everyday words for infants and toddlers to develop their vocabulary. Featuring 100 beautiful color photographs, this tough board book introduces words and phrases of animals, toys, vehicles, and items used for mealtimes, bathtimes, and bedtimes that are ideal for children aged 2 and up to learn how to read and identify objects.
Download or read book Spell It Out written by David Crystal and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of English spelling through chapters that cover such topics as the introduction of the Roman alphabet, each letter's origins, and the development of long and short vowels.
Download or read book The Hundreds written by Lauren Berlant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.
Download or read book The Stories of English written by David Crystal and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2005-09-06 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: “Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration.” —The Guardian In this “well-informed and appealing” work (Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on “standard” English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as “incorrect” English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today. Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. “A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like.” —The New York Times “Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions).” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.” —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Download or read book Making Sense written by David Crystal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making Sense, David Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, grammar disappeared from most school curricula, so that terms such as "preposition" and "conjunction" now often confound children and adults alike. Explaining the nuts and bolts of grammar presents a special challenge, because - far more than is the case with spelling and punctuation - the subject is burdened with a centuries-old history of educational practice that many will recall as anything but glamorous. One of the world's foremost authorities on the English language, Crystal sets out to rid grammar of its undeserved reputation as a dry and intimidating subject, pointing out how essential grammar is to clear and effective speech and writing. He moves briskly through the stages by which children acquire grammar, along the way demystifying grammar's rules and irregularities and showing us how to navigate its snares and pitfalls. He offers the fascinating history of grammar, explaining how it has evolved from the first grammarians in ancient Greece to our 21st century digital environment of blogging, emailing, and texting. Many find grammar to be a daunting subject, but in this breezy, entertaining book, Crystal proves that grammar doesn't need to make us uneasy-we can all make sense of how we make sense.
Download or read book Say What written by Gena K. Gorrell and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a million words, weird spellings, words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently or vice versa. Where on Earth did the English language come from? The answer is that English isn’t just the speech of one nation. It’s the memory of thousands of years of history. It tracks the places people came from, the places they went, the adventures they had, the friends and enemies they made, the battles they won and lost. As English changed and grew, it became a jumble of sounds, words, and rules from countless languages and nations. And it’s still changing and growing every day. More than seventy percent of all English words were born someplace other than England. That’s why English can be so confusing and inconsistent. And that’s why English is the richest, most international, and most versatile language in the world. This innovative book takes us on a journey through time to unravel and demystify the story of English. Word games, intriguing facts, and tricky quizzes add an element of fun while enriching readers’ knowledge and understanding.
Download or read book The Story of English written by Joseph Piercy and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Story of English illustrates the compelling history of how the relatively obscure dialects spoken by tribes from what are now Denmark, the Low Countries and northern Germany, became the most widely spoken language in the world, and of how that language evolved during the last two millennia. Chronologically ordered and divided into six main sections covering pre-Roman and Latin influences, the ascent of Old English, and the succession of Middle English, Early Modern and then Late Modern English to today's global language, this fascinating book also explores such factors as the history of the printing press, the works of Chaucer, the evolution of The American Dictionary of the English Language - commonly known as Webster's - and the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, to the use of slang in today's speech and the coming of electronic messaging: language for a post-modern world.The Story of English is a great book for any lover not just of English, but of the history and development of language.
Download or read book The Story of be written by David Crystal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The verb be has a remarkable history, and a wider range of meanings, uses, and forms than any other English word. In this book, David Crystal explores the intriguing story of this verb over 26 chapters, each linked to a particular usage. Chapters explore, for instance, circumstantial be ('how are you?'), numerical be ('two and two is four'), quotative be ('so I was like, "wow"'), and ludic be ('oh no he isn't!'). Thediscussion is accompanied by examples from a whole host of sources, literary and otherwise, such as Beowulf, Jane Austen, pantomime, and Star Wars, and further illustrated by cartoons including several from late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century issues of Punch. Full of fascinating nuggets of information, this book will appeal to a broad audience of lovers of words and language.
Download or read book Making a Point written by David Crystal and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The triumphant concluding volume in David Crystal's classic trilogy on the English language combines the first history of English punctuation with a complete guide on how to use it. Behind every punctuation mark lies a thousand stories. The punctuation of English, marked with occasional rationality, is founded on arbitrariness and littered with oddities. For a system of a few dozen marks it generates a disproportionate degree of uncertainty and passion, inspiring organizations like the Apostrophe Protection Society and sending enthusiasts, correction-pens in hand, in a crusade against error across the United States. Professor Crystal leads us through this minefield with characteristic wit, clarity, and commonsense. In David Crystal's Making a Point, he gives a fascinating account of the origin and progress of every kind of punctuation mark over one and a half millennia and offers sound advice on how punctuation may be used to meet the needs of every occasion and context.
Download or read book Words in Time and Place written by David Crystal and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that the English language has over 150 words for the adjective 'drunk' developed over 1,000 years? Be prepared to learn words you have never heard before, find out fascinating facts behind everyday words, and be surprised at how lively and varied the English language can be. Published to critical acclaim in 2009, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is the first comprehensive thesaurus in the world to arrange words by meaning in order of first recorded use. Using its unique perspective on how the English language has developed, Words in Time and Place takes 15 themes and explores the language in these areas over time - explaining when new words appeared, where they came from, and what such changes say about times in which they emerged. The themes chosen are varied, universal topics and show the semantic range of the thesaurus and what it can tell us about the words used in areas of everyday life. Learn about the different words for dying and money, or types of pop music, as well as words for a privy, oaths, and words for being drunk. Written by the world's leading expert on the English language, David Crystal, the book carries his trademark style of engaging yet authoritative writing. Each chapter features an introduction to the language of that topic, followed by a timeline of vocabulary taken from the historical thesaurus showing all the synonyms arranged in chronological order. The timelines are annotated with additional quotations, facts, and social and historical context to give a clear sense of how words entered the English language, when, and in which context they were used. Words in Time and Place showcases the unique and excellent resource that is the Historical Thesaurus and reveals the linguistic treasures to be found within. This fascinating book will appeal to anyone with an interest in words and in the development of the English language.
Download or read book One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.
Download or read book Spell It Out written by David Crystal and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their foreign ears, and it stuck. Seventy-five per cent of English spelling is regular but twenty-five per cent is complicated, and in Spell It Out, our foremost linguistics expert David Crystal extends a helping hand to the confused and curious alike. He unearths the stories behind the rogue words that confound us, and explains why these peculiarities entered the mainstream, in an epic journey taking in sixth century monks, French and Latin upstarts, the Industrial Revolution and the internet. By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right.
